Tomi "lurppis" Kovanen is a Finnish former professional Counter-Strike 1.6 player and current General Manager for Immortals[1]. Kovanen was previously the in-game leader of teams such as wings/Serious Gaming, hoorai/69°N-28°E/ROCCAT, Evil Geniuses and WinFakt. During his playing career he managed to earn some of the largest prize money of any player in his era, being ranked the 45th highest earning player in CS 1.6. [2] In the past he has been a co-host on [POD]Cast, Co-Editor-in-Chief at HLTV.org, and an occasional caster and analyst. Kovanen is also a partner in ENCE eSports. [3] He is also the older brother of naSu. [4]

Kovanen first originally played for a Finnish team called wings in 2004 up until late 2005 before becoming Serious Gaming. With his first professional team, he had attended various international tournaments such as CPLs around the world as well as DreamHack Summer 2005 which he and his team most notably had won. Another notable result was CPL Spain 2005 where his team were first matched up against North American giants Team 3D but the Finnish team did not let them get an easy pass through the tournament and managed to upset them 16-11, before falling to mibr in the next round before being eliminated later by fellow Brazilian team g3nerationX. Under the Serious Gaming banner, they did not have many good results apart from a third place at shgOpen 2006 where they would finish their tournament life to Fnatic. His results would then improve under the Hoorai banner, later 69°N-28°E where they would eventually clinch titles over potentially some of the best teams - most notably NGL-One Season II over Fnatic and WSVG 2007 Louisville over SK Gaming. Results would then become mixed once again and lurppis would move over to Team ROCCAT where they would most notably under this organization's banner clinch second place at NGL-One Season IV falling to Fnatic. There would then be a short break from tournaments, where lurppis would only attend smaller tournaments with much smaller teams, with the exception of Electronic Sports World Cup Masters of Paris which he would participate with Excello.

In 2009, lurppis would take another huge step in his playing career and move over to the United States to play with Evil Geniuses consisting of legends Jordan "n0thing" Gilbert, Danny "fRoD" Montaner, Tyler "Storm" Wood and Matt "Warden" Dickens. In this team, he would be the in-game leader, which he assumed in many of his previous Finnish teams. With this team however, he would help the Americans with his much needed European experience in order to clinch games off of many different European teams, as well as winning international tournaments which was something this team would end up doing further down the line. Most notably with Evil Geniuses Kovanen & co. would win Intel Extreme Masters Season IV American Championship Finals over their rival team compLexity Gaming as well as MSI Beat It! 2010 over Fnatic. After a long journey of mixed results including some big victories and big failures, Kovanen decided to step down from the North American team and make his return back to Finland where he would continue playing for various Finnish teams.

After retiring in 2012, lurppis worked for HLTV for a sum of time but has also been present at a set few tournaments as a caster and analyst. He also moved from Finland to London, United Kingdom as an investment banker. Alongside working his job in London, he was most notably an analyst at a series of Esports Championship Series events as well as ESG Tour Mykonos 2017 and BLAST Pro Series: Copenhagen 2017. In January 2016, he was hired by ENCE eSports as a partner alongside former Counter-Strike: Source pro Juha "aNGeldusT" Kurppa and former teammate Joona "natu" Leppänen. On February 21st 2018, Immortals signed him as their General Manager, also resulting in him moving back to the United States to work with the organization in Los Angeles, California.